


on the house

by acezukos (purplefennels7)



Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [7]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Pre-Relationship, it's a college au.....with a coffee shop au inside it, kya and hakoda are bffs, they're becomin friends though, wlw kya for rights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25761640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/acezukos
Summary: There's a cute cashier at the cafe in the university library, and Hakoda's been trying to muster the courage to speak to him for over a month now. It takes Kya and an impending deadline to push him to make a move.ft. lit major hakoda, chem major kya, and history major bato
Relationships: Bato/Hakoda (Avatar), Kya & Hakoda (Avatar)
Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851535
Comments: 29
Kudos: 136
Collections: Bakoda Fleet Week 2020





	on the house

**Author's Note:**

> late late late....i know...i haven't had a brain cell for two days (i WILL go back to do day 6 this idea just possessed me and then suddenly it was nearly 5k; it is not edited so like...errors are my own). will i ever write something not a modern au? who knows. this is yet again a love letter to my uni - shoutout to the south campus library cafe. also kya is a chem major bc she's better than me. this is not plot relevant y'all just need to know that.

Hakoda is walking home from his afternoon Comparative Literature class, tapping out a couple ideas for his midterm paper in his notes app, when he feels someone tap him on the shoulder. He glances in that direction, then jumps as an arm links through his on the other side. 

“I can’t believe you still fall for that,” Kya laughs, knocking her shoulder into his side. 

“Neither can I,” he grumbles, tugging his headphones out and tucking them into his pocket. “I should know by this point that you find joy in seeing me make a fool of myself.”

“Well, maybe if your jokes were funnier I wouldn’t need to resort to physical comedy.” 

“Ouch,” he says, putting on an affronted air, complete with a hand pressed dramatically to his chest. He refrains from bringing up the old argument - that he still believes, thank you very much - that they were friends because she’d thought the fish joke he’d made during freshman orientation was funny. “Anyway. What’s up?”

“Oh, right. Wanna study later? I know you have that paper due...next week, right?” He nods in affirmation. “Yeah, and I have lab in like, ten minutes and I’m gonna want to get started on the writeup when I’m done.”

“Is that the one with the lab partner you have a crush on?” he asks, knowing full well that it’s the truth. She blushes darkly, glaring at him.

“Shut up. She barely likes me, not after I dropped half of our sample into the waste bucket by accident last week.” 

“Didn’t she also give you her number, though?” He would know; she’d barged into his dorm room after last week’s lab and laid on the ground for half an hour talking about  _ Lei this _ and  _ Lei that _ and  _ Hakoda I’m an idiot _ while he’d made sympathetic noises and tried to keep working on his annotations.

“For  _ work, _ yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes. He sincerely doubts that, but then again, has not yet  _ met _ this mysterious girl, so that’s something.

“Sure. Let me know if I need to fight anyone.” She snorts.

“I can fight people myself, thank you very much. If you could fight physical chemistry, like, as a concept, though, I’d take you up on it.”

“I barely know what that is. Anyway, you were the one who decided to be a chem major.” They’ve reached the main street where one of the campus busses is just pulling into the stop, and Kya glances at her phone and swears loudly, unlinking her arm from his to yank her student ID out of her wallet.

“A chem major who’s about to be late if I don’t make that bus,  _ again.” _

“Go! I’ll find a space in the library and text you later, you can meet me there?” She throws up a thumbs-up, already dashing off down the street to join the queue of students climbing aboard the bus. Hakoda waves after her, then heads over to the crosswalk, bouncing on his toes as he waits for the light to change. He should probably eat dinner before he starts on the paper, because he’s fully aware that once he gets into the rhythm of it, he probably won’t emerge for however long it takes to finish the thing. He’s been putting off writing the second half for the whole week, anyway, after he’d gotten stuck at the end of the second body.

Later, when he’s settling into a table in the front corner of the little cafe in the library, he thinks that his subconscious had ulterior motives, because this is the cafe with the cute cashier with the dimples who always smiles at him when he orders. He’s been trying to work up the nerve to speak to him for over a month now. He might demonstrably kick ass at public speaking, but all of that skill goes out the window the moment he tries to talk to someone to their actual face. The brief time that he and Kya had dated at the end of freshman year is still remembered mostly for his multiple failures at actually asking her out before she took matters into her own hands and did it for him. 

He briefly considers moving somewhere else - one of the second floor study rooms is bound to be unoccupied, and also probably quieter than here. When he looks up from extricating his laptop from his bag, though, cute cashier - Bato, as he’d gleaned from his name tag just last week - gives him a little smile and, well, now he’s been seen, he can’t leave. After a moment of waffling, he smiles back.

This place has the best coffee, anyway. 

He texts Kya quickly where he is, and then digs around in his backpack for his wallet. It’s barely 6:30 and most people are probably at dinner, so there’s no line at the counter as he strolls over as casually as he can. Bato pops his head up from where he’s rummaging in the cabinets, a bag of tea leaves in his hand.

“Hi, Hakoda,” he says, setting the tea leaves down and reaching for the marker in his apron pocket. Hakoda fights not to be pleased that he remembers his name. “You want your usual? Caramel latte, right?”

“Oh, um, yeah, medium please” Hakoda says, fumbling for his credit card. “You remember my order?” This is definitely not how one is supposed to flirt, he thinks.

“Well, you’re in here a...latte.” Hakoda stares at him, and then bursts into startled laughter. 

“Was that a  _ pun?” _ he asks, still snickering. Bato is laughing as well, eyes crinkling at the corners, and Hakoda thinks he’s in love.

“Finally, someone who appreciates good humour.” He turns away so he can pour Hakoda’s drink, and Hakoda takes the opportunity to stare surreptitiously at his face, half in profile as he squints at the espresso machine, and those are some seriously impressive cheekbones.

“I’ll never pass up a  _ pun _ der in crime,” Hakoda says as Bato hands him the cup, and Bato nearly drops it as his eyes go wide in surprise, and it’s honestly criminal that it’s taken Hakoda this long to notice just how blue they are.

“I think we are going to be very good friends,” Bato says with a wink, steadying the cup in Hakoda’s hand. Their fingers brush as Bato lets go, and Hakoda nearly drops the damn thing anyway.

“I do too,” he manages to get out, handing over his card in something of a daze. They’re quiet for the few moments it takes for Bato to finish the transaction and return Hakoda’s card and the receipt.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” Bato says, and ah, there are the  _ dimples,  _ and Hakoda’s heart may never recover. He swears that was the reason he hadn’t known Bato’s actual name until the second time he’d came in that semester, because the thought of checking his nametag had entirely fled his brain when he’d seen those dimples for the first time.

“See ya,” he replies inanely, feeling a little like he’s been whacked in the face. He makes his way back to his table in a daze, setting his coffee down on top of his notebook and going to put his card away before he discovers that he’s apparently left his wallet. At the same time he hears his name in Bato’s deep voice, and wheels around to see him holding up his wallet.

“You forgot this,” he says as Hakoda dashes back over, knocking his hip painfully into a table on the way and leaving himself leaning against the counter to rub at it. 

“Thanks.” He smiles tentatively at him - even through the pain of his newly bruised hip - and is rewarded by another glimpse of the dimples. He returns to his table again without another major incident, and decides that he’s succeeded in not making an absolute fool of himself. And when he catches Bato looking over at him in between making drinks for the next two people to file into the cafe, he decides this one might be a solid win.

Kya comes in about half an hour later when Hakoda’s finished one of the remaining body paragraphs and started on the last one. 

“Hey,” she says, dropping heavily into the chair across from him, a pair of green splash goggles perched atop her head and red pressure lines around her eyes.

“Hey. You’ve got…” he motions to the top of her head, and she bats at it until the goggles fall around her neck, squinting at them like she’s seeing them for the first time.

“Huh. I definitely stole those. Whoops.” She shrugs and yanks them off, tossing them into her backpack and exchanging them for her laptop and a calculator. “But...guess what?”

“Lab went well?” She nods. She usually looks exhausted coming out of lab, and Hakoda can’t blame her - the things are four hours long for some reason he still can’t wrap his head around - but right now she looks like she’s about to start vibrating.

“Yes, but, Lei asked me if I wanted to study next week Monday, and I said yeah, obviously, and she looked really happy about it but we’re not really friends yet I guess so it’s probably just a friend thing…” Hakoda lowers his forehead slowly to rest on top of his laptop.

“With all the love in the world, I hate gay people.”

“You  _ are _ gay people, Koda,” Kya answers. “Have some sympathy.”

“I said what I said.” He raises his head and grins at her. “Anyway, if she doesn’t like you then she just doesn’t have taste.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m a catch,” she says with a wink. He shakes his head ruefully, trying and failing to hide a fond smile. “Anyway. The lab still kicked my ass, I gotta get to work so I don’t look like an idiot when Lei has it all done and I can’t do question one.” 

“Yeah, I gotta finish this last paragraph before the idea abandons me.” He sighs and lifts his head off his laptop, opening it back up to the stubbornly half-empty word document. 

Ten minutes later, he’s glanced over at Bato where he’s taking orders behind the counter about ten times and only typed one sentence, most of which he irritably backspaces after reading it over again. Kya, her lab notebook propped up against the side of her laptop, is busily typing away, but she looks up when he picks up one of his books and buries his face in it, wondering if he’ll absorb the theme through osmosis.

“What’s got you so distracted?” she asks, tugging the book away. Hakoda squints at her, then swears quietly to himself and backspaces the line of random letters he’d pressed.

“Nothing,” he replies after a beat too long of silence. “Tired, I guess.” Kya snorts and taps his ankle with the toe of her boot.

“Oh, please. You’re the only person I know who regularly gets eight hours of sleep, you’re never tired.” 

“All your weird STEM major friends shouldn’t count, you know. I think you’ve all secretly, like, genetically engineered yourselves to only need four hours of sleep or something.” She grins wolfishly, and he backpedals, waving his hands. “Or, actually, forget I said that, you’d all be too powerful if you didn’t have to sleep, please for the sake of the world don’t try that.”

“Stop trying to change the subject. Although, that’s an interesting thought - no, okay. What’s bothering you?” Ever since he and Kya had started being friends, he’s developed a healthy fear of chemistry majors, and honestly of anyone who spends more than two hours a week in a laboratory. Not that he doesn’t think they’re going to change the world for the better or anything, but hasn’t anyone read  _ Frankenstein? _

“Nothing,” he repeats.

“If you say so,” she says, and a second later the sound of her typing starts up again. His ability to pull the wool over her eyes, if it had ever existed in the first place, is pretty much nil, though, and a few torturous sentences later, she pokes him again with a shit-eating grin on her face. 

“You  _ like _ someone,” she sing-songs, and only after he’s instinctively looked over at Bato, who’s now watering the plants on the far end of the counter, does he realize his mistake. “Is it-”

“Shh!” he hisses, waving his hands frantically. “He’ll hear,” he continues, quieter. 

“Ah, so you admit it!” she says, smirking, and he hides behind his book again, cheeks flaming. “Good choice. He’s cute.”

“You aren’t allowed to insult my taste because you’d be insulting yourself, remember?” Hakoda says into the pages. 

“I was complimenting it, dumbass. You gonna talk to him anytime this year, or...?”

“I just did, thank you very much, his name is Bato, and his jokes are almost better than mine.” 

“Oh god,” she says, slapping a hand to her forehead, “there’s two of them.” She looks at him disbelievingly, like he’s done her a personal insult - the jokes thing probably - but thankfully drops the subject. Hakoda stays with the book in front of his face for another minute, thinking of nothing in particular, when a thought for his next paragraph suddenly pops to the front of his mind, and he practically drops the book to lunge for his keyboard, draining the rest of his coffee as he starts typing. When he emerges from the focus fog, Kya is scrolling through something on her phone, laptop shut, and it’s dark outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Shit, how long was I working on that?” he says, rubbing his eyes and pushing back in his chair. 

“Like, two hours, something like that?” Kya replies, handing over her water bottle as he tips back his coffee to find it empty. “I’ve only been done for like, half an hour though.”

“Ugh, it got away from me again. Whatever. I’ll cut it tomorrow, it’s done now.” As they pack their stuff away to walk back to their dorms, he looks over at the counter to see someone else manning the register, and feels oddly disappointed. Not that him and Bato are friends, not yet anyway, but still. One more chance to talk is one more chance to not look like an idiot - and maybe to get his number, if he’s really lucky. He can’t let a fellow dad joke connoisseur go just like that. The looks are just a bonus.

* * *

About three days later, he’s back in the cafe, because all of his professors have made their midterm papers due somewhere within the same two weeks, and he’s been putting off this last one in favour of the other two. That had seemed like a brilliant plan up until he’d finished the second paper and realized he only had two days to do the last one, and promptly panicked. Kya isn’t with him this time, because she’s off on her not-a-study-date study date with Lei, so he’s free to fold himself into one of the corner booths that she hates for some reason and spread out the books he’d brought for references over the larger table. Bato is behind the counter again, but seems swamped in the after-dinner rush and Hakoda really doesn’t have time to stand in line right now, so he settles for giving him a little wave and starting to dig through his bag for his laptop. 

With his outline on half his screen and a blank word document open on the other half, he thinks that if he can just get himself to focus, he might have a chance of getting it in before the deadline. The problem with this plan, apparently, is the ‘focusing’ part of it. 

After exactly fifty-three minutes, he’s achieved a thesis, formatted the document, and not very much more than that. He keeps glancing at the clock on the wall and calculating how much time is left until the deadline instead of actually trying to meet the deadline. 

“Coffee,” he declares a little too loudly, feeling frazzled and too big for his own body because he was sure that he’d known what he was going to write about, but the words seem to be stuck inside his head. A couple heads turn in his direction, and he mouths a  _ Sorry _ and hurries over to the counter.

“Can I get a large black coffee, two sugars?” he rushes out before Bato even opens his mouth, running his fingers repeatedly along the side of his credit card.

“Hey, yeah, sure,” Bato replies, looking a little taken aback but grabbing the appropriate cup and going to fill it. “Are you alright?”

“Uh, yeah I’m fine. God, that was so rude, I’m so sorry.” Great going, Hakoda, he thinks to himself, resisting the urge to scream. “I’ve a term paper due at midnight and I’ve written, like a sentence in the past hour.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bato says kindly, handing him his coffee. “Everyone has those sorts of days. I mean, I literally did that last week. I can...if you want we can chat for a minute, if it would help get your brain working, or you probably need to get back, huh?”

“No,” Hakoda yelps, “I mean, please tell me, I need to be thinking about something that isn’t Emmanuel Kant for like, five minutes.”

“Kant? Wait, that guy’s such a dick, have you read that thing on aesthetics?” Hakoda blinks in surprise.

“Yeah, wait, you’ve read him?” Bato grins, glancing around and then stepping over to the bartop and propping his elbows on it. Hakoda follows, taking a seat on one of the brown stools.

“Yeah, last semester for modern European history we had to read the aesthetics thing and can I say,  _ ugh.” _

“Right? Like, racism central right there. You a history major, then?” He takes a sip of his coffee as Bato nods.

“Yeah, I haven’t really decided my concentration yet so I’m kinda trying whatever I can get into right now. I don’t wanna do European because history is already so Euro-centric, but for some reason half the prereqs are European anyway.” 

“White people,” Hakoda sighs, rolling his eyes. Bato laughs, and damn, he has a really nice laugh. “It’s the same for Lit, honestly, sick of reading just old white men. I’m only allowing myself to use Kant for this paper because I’m gonna rip him apart.” 

“Good for you,” Bato says, reaching out to pat him approvingly on the arm. “I’m sure it’ll turn out well, you seem like the sort of person to excel at the polite takedown.”

“You haven’t read anything I’ve written,” Hakoda protests, but the comment still makes him feel sort of gooey inside. “Speaking of, I should be getting back - this is due at midnight, and I’ve still got like ten pages to go.”

“Yeah, definitely. Here-” he stands back up and goes over to the display case with an assortment of pastries, taking out a cinnamon roll and wrapping it in a napkin. “On the house. I believe in you.”

“I can’t - are you allowed to do that? I don’t wanna get you in trouble,” Hakoda says quickly. 

“I won’t say anything if you don’t,” Bato says, winking, and shoves the napkin at him. “Go on, kick Kant’s ass.”

“Thanks, Bato. Really.” He unwraps the cinnamon roll on his way back to his table, and in all honesty it isn’t particularly remarkable, but also it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. 

“Okay, Kant,” he mumbles to himself, sitting back down and typing in his passcode. “Take this.” And to his utter surprise, the words come. He writes straight through the empty space he’d left in his outline that he’d been stuck on last night, with the help of one more coffee - actually paid for this time, no matter how hard Bato tried to get him to just take it. Around 10:30 pm the cafe starts emptying out, and by the time the clock hits 11, there’s only him, one other person in the corner with an astounding assortment of coloured pens on their table, and someone sitting at the counter muttering about differential equations. Bato passes by him soon after that, a watering can in one hand, and gives him a thumbs-up. Hakoda waves back with the hand not scribbling a note into his book.

“You doing okay?” Bato calls over his shoulder as he starts watering the big fern in the corner of the cafe.

“Uh-huh,” Hakoda replies. “Just the conclusion left and then I gotta edit.”

“You’ve got this. We’re open til midnight anyway.”

“Really? Sweet, I don’t have to walk home in the middle of it.” He keeps on typing. 

Bato finishes watering the plants and then actually comes over to sit on the other side of the table, looking content to sit and scroll through something on his phone.

“Aren’t you working?” Hakoda asks him when he comes over at first. 

“Well, yeah, but no one’s here.” He squints at Bato, who’s taken off his apron and looks generally like he’s off-duty, but he honestly doesn’t have the spare brain cells to think about that right now.

It takes him about 40 more minutes to finish up the entire thing and reformat it because when he’d opened the assignment he’d realized that his professor wanted point 12 font, not point 11, and he has to take out a few sentences to get it within the page limit. He hits submit at exactly 11:57 and waits for a few heart-pounding seconds as it gives him a loading wheel.

“Done!” he cheers as the button goes green.

“Yes!” Bato cheers just as loudly, holding up a hand for a high-five. The other people in the cafe are gone now, just the two of them in their little corner booth, and the sound of them slapping hands feels too loud for the hour. “I’m proud.”

“Thanks,” Hakoda says, feeling very warm as Bato smiles at him, and he knows he’s grinning like a fool but can’t bring himself to stop. As he starts packing his books back into the second tote bag that he’s brought for them, Bato hops to his feet.

“Be right back.” Hakoda nods and watches him dash off around the counter, feeling again too big for his body but for a completely different reason. By the time Bato returns, another brown napkin clutched in one hand, Hakoda is slinging his backpack over his shoulders and hefting the tote bag in both arms.

“Hey, which way are you going? I’m off shift so I’m going home too,” Bato says, reaching up to pull his hair out of the ponytail. Hakoda looks up at him, surprised, and he thinks he can be forgiven for the way his brain goes briefly blank, because he’s never seen Bato with his hair down before and that is something else.

“Oh, I’m going south. You?” he gets out once his brain comes back online, hoping on one hand that he’s going the same way, and also not, because he can feel the exhaustion dragging at him already.

“Hey, south as well. Mind if I walk with you?” The aforementioned two parts of him cheer and groan respectively.

“Yeah, definitely,” is what eventually comes out of his mouth. 

“Cool.” They fall into step together, heading out of the cafe and down to the ground floor of the library. “You know, college is weird because you can just ask someone where they live and not have it be creepy.”

“Right? It’d be so creepy if I just walked up to someone and asked them ‘hey where do you live?’ but for the next couple years I guess it’s just normal.” 

The walk back to the south campus dorms is relatively short; Bato asks him about his “epic takedown,” as he puts it, of Emmanuel Kant, and keeps interjecting puns that Hakoda knows would make Kya roll her eyes hard enough to fall out of her head. He thinks they’re great, obviously.

“This is me,” Hakoda says as they reach the second dorm in the quad. 

“Here,” Bato says, thrusting the napkin at him. “This is for you.” Hakoda peeks inside and finds a croissant and a little packet of butter.

“Oh god, dude, you really have to stop stealing stuff from your job. You’re making me an accomplice,” he jokes, but carefully places the napkin atop his books. “Thanks. And also for like, staying while I worked on that paper, I know it’s your job and all but it was nice to have someone there.”

“It was no trouble, really.” They’re quiet for a second, and Bato looks...almost disappointed, somehow, but it’d be far too weird to ask, right? “Um. I’ll see you…”

“Soon,” Hakoda blurts, and Bato gives him a relieved-looking smile.

“Yeah. Good night, Hakoda.”

“Night.” Hakoda dashes up the steps to his dorm, not really breathing until he’s scanned his ID into the lounge. He takes the chance of peeking out the blinds to see Bato walking away, but lets them snap shut, heart jumping, when it looks like he might be about to turn around. He is not going to seem like a creeper, seriously.

When he gets back up to his room, he unpacks the croissant and places it gently on his desk before dumping all the books out in a pile on the floor. Tomorrow Hakoda can deal with those. 

On a whim, he unwraps the croissant again, and something on the napkin that he hadn’t noticed in the rush of packing up in the cafe catches his eye. And - oh,  _ shit. _ Bato’s only gone and written his number on the napkin.

He swears aloud and scrabbles for his phone, because  _ fuck, _ Bato probably thought that he’d seen it and not wanted to offend him by mentioning it. He proceeds to spend the next ten minutes drafting and redrafting a text, heart pounding, before he throws in the towel and texts Kya.

> <<hakoda, 00:13. ky u gotta help me bato gave me his number and i think i sorta didnt notice until now and what do i say>>
> 
> <<kya, 00:15. literally just say hi? i hate gay people wtf>>
> 
> <<hakoda, 00:15. thanks i hate u too how was ur date>>
> 
> <<kya, 00:16. not a date but.>>
> 
> <<kya, 00:16. good>>
> 
> <<kya, 00:17. why r u asking me things, go get him, dude, i’ll tell you abt it in the morning.>>
> 
> <<hakoda, 00:18. okay FINE but if this goes badly it’s ur fault>>

He can practically feel her eye roll through the phone. In his defense, he needs to get this right.

> <<hakoda, 00:22. hey bato, this is hakoda. sorry it took me a hot second to text it’s been a long night, but i did get ur number.>>

He drops his phone face down on his desk and throws himself onto his bed, groaning into the pillow. That sounded so stupid, but it’s sent already and he can’t take it back. He lies there, feeling a little like he’s going to throw up, until he hears the buzz of an incoming text and nearly trips over his own discarded shoe to get to it.

> <<bato, 00:24. hey hakoda, it’s no problem you were pretty stressed tonight.>>
> 
> <<bato, 00:24. you got there in the end though. congrats again on finishing the paper :)>>
> 
> <<hakoda, 00:26. thanks! also, i just realized i never paid u for literally anything besides that one coffee, can i get u the money next time i come in?>>
> 
> <<bato, 00:27. okay this might be a little weird and you can say no if you want, i won’t be offended. but, what if you meet me at that place on 23rd and cross for lunch tomorrow? you can pay if you want.>>

Wait a second. Wait just a  _ damn second. _

> <<hakoda, 00:28. that’s not weird at all i’d love to. is 1pm ok? ive class until 12:45>>
> 
> <<bato, 00:28. yeah definitely! see you tomorrow then?>>
> 
> <<hakoda, 00:29. see u tomorrow :) yeah im definitely goin to sleep now lol...good night>>
> 
> <<bato, 00:30. good night>>

Hakoda puts his phone down again and stares at it for a minute, and then fairly jumps out of his chair to fist-pump. If he isn’t reading this wrong, which he definitely could be, he might have a date, and all it’d taken was one mild breakdown in the coffee shop. 

He can’t wait to tell Kya. She’s going to make  _ so much fun of him. _

Worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> written for day 7 of [bakoda fleet week](https://bakodafleetweek.tumblr.com) for _free day_. comments and kudos warm my heart <3 
> 
> on [tumblr](https://acezukos.tumblr.com)


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